President Obama has offered his analysis of the Tea Party movement. According to Obama, the movement is a “loose amalgam” whose “core” consists of “folks who just weren’t sure whether I was born in the United States, whether I was a socialist.” Around that core, the president acknowledges, is a “broader circle of people, who are legitimately concerned about the deficit, who are legitimately concerned that the federal government may be taking on too much.”
It’s big of Obama to concede that there are some among the opposition who have concerns he deems legitimate. I wonder, though, what his basis is for concluding that this is a “circle” outside of the core. Has Obama engaged the Tea Party movement? Has he studied it?
I doubt it. More likely, his analysis stems from the same condescending a priori leftist narrative as his famous comment that working-class voters in Pennsylvania and the Midwest “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
I’m no expert on the Tea Party movement either. However, based on my encounters with it, I suspect that the core consists of people who are concerned about the deficit and the expansion of government’s role, and who worry, legitimately, that Obama may be a Socialist.
Via Politico, which preposterously labels Obama’s self-serving musings a “dissection” of the Tea Party movement.
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